The Hedgehog and the Fox go on a Yoga Retreat
Reflections on four weeks in the Spanish mountains
“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Archilochus
Isaiah Berlin used this fragment from an Ancient Greek poet in his 1953 essay on Tolstoy as a way of dividing thinkers into two camps: foxes who embrace the chaos of reality; and, hedgehogs who channel reality into a single, universal system.
For instance, Shakespeare is a fox who uses his characters to present a multitude of divergent ideas. Whereas Marx is a hedgehog who seeks to explain everything through materialism.1 In Tolstoy, Berlin saw a tension between the fox-like intuitions as a historical novelist and the hedgehog-like theology of his later years.
I've been thinking of this distinction after attending Kia Naddermier's yoga retreat in Spain for the fourth year in a row.
At first glance, Kia is a hedgehog. She is a practitioner of Ashtanga Yoga, a form that teaches a set sequence of postures that students learn and then repeat on their own with subtle guidance from assistants. And, like most people who go deep into yoga studies, she often refers back to the precepts in Patanjali's Sutras or the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita.
But Kia is not a blind devotee to Ashtanga and includes wisdom from Buddhism, Chinese medicine, and other branches of yoga, in particular the pranayama from Kaivalyadham. What makes her teachings so valuable is the sense that everything has been rigorously tested in her own physical practice. This makes Kia parsimonious with what she allows into her teachings, keeping them simple and effective.
At the beginning of the retreat, Kia asked everyone to set an intention for their time there.2 Mine was rather abstract: to go from gas to liquid. I had a sense of myself as being totally diffused, ungrounded, and scattered. In other words, I am a chaotic fox who wants to become a more focused hedgehog. Now that the retreat has ended, I thought it would be useful to reflect on what I learned.
Not knowing is most intimate
When you arrive at a yoga retreat you are filled with ideas of what it’s going to be like and what you'll get out of it. You might aspire to get the next posture or achieve some Zen-like state. These projections of the mind tend to get in the way of experiencing things directly. To help quieten these expectations, Kia introduced the session with the following Koan:
Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going from here?”
Fayan said, “I’m on pilgrimage.”
“What sort of thing is pilgrimage?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not knowing is most intimate.”
Fayan suddenly had a great awakening.
Only by having a beginner's mind, not freighted with expectations, can we see things as they are.
One of Isaiah Berlin's hedgehogs is Plato, who via Socrates, is famous for the koan-like line "I only know that I know nothing." What I love about these ideas of not knowing and knowing nothing is that they combine hedgehog discipline with the openness of the fox.
Felt Sense
After asking us to formulate an intention, Kia asked everyone to make a commitment to their own felt sense. What this means is that your own physical intuition has authority over any instruction.
Kia’s teachings may well be timeless truths, but she doesn't claim to be a guru. This is her research. We are invited to inquire along with her and embed as we choose. She asks us to feel how the breath changes with different alignments and to move from the Hara: your centre of gravity and the seat of your gut feelings.
Last year she talked a lot about the midline, the connecting thread down the centre of the body. This year this concept has been deepened with the Hara and how breath can be blocked and released. Your body is not a sack of flesh carrying around a mind, but an integrated mind-body. Liberation is only possible when you realise how things like breath change consciousness and how the external world affects the breath.
When I’m listening to Kia, I always feel that it is better to learn one thing well than a multitude of things badly; to see things like a hedgehog, not run around like a fox.
Discernment and compassion
Contemporary practitioners of mindfulness sometimes claim that present moment awareness is enough. But Kia, following the Buddha, thinks we need to practice discernment of what is wholesome and unwholesome in our actions to be truly mindful.
Discernment leads to intentionality: informed decisions about what to do.
We can never guarantee the outcome of our actions. An innocent remark over dinner might be interpreted in a way you had no idea was possible. Beating yourself up for mistakes is no guarantee of gaining a discernment of wholesome actions. It is through compassion that we reduce the sense of separation from each other recognising the darkness in ourselves as a way of having compassion for others.
At Kia's retreat in 2020, she mentioned the parable of the two wolves: one good and one bad, where the one that wins is the one you feed. I have never been happy with this story because it implicitly rejects integration and seems to represent a journey of domestication where taming the wildness of the supposedly 'bad' wolf. The origin of the story is also quite surprising.
I wonder if we can't improve the parable to say:
Inside of you, there are two animals. One is a hedgehog that establishes an integrated sense of the world and the other is a fox that embraces the multiplicity of life. They were never in competition and both have their roles to play.
Some more examples Berlin gives are Dante, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust as hedgehogs; and, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce as foxes.
I also had an intention that I didn't mention. This was not to get injured. Last year, I sprained my ankle trail running in the mountains. This intention was less successful and almost exactly the same thing happened.
Despite being very careful when running and walking over rocky paths, my ankle turned in on itself on a flat bit of road while my mind was elsewhere. Possibly doing yoga changes my ankle flexibility and I don’t have the proprioception to account for the change, but I’ll blame the mindlesness.
Unfotunately, I have a fantasy of myself as a trail runner and this overrides my felt sense. Most injuries come when we live in the head rather than the body.